Page 13 of Confessions of Pain
“I…I didn’t plan on this,” Titus interrupted. He had a bewildered look on his face. Oh, and worried. He looked really worried.
I frowned. “What do you mean? You didn’t plan on what?”
Ethan’s feet hit the floor with a thud. “Titus, what have you done?” He demanded as he glared at his younger brother.
“I, uh, I thought I was doing something good. You know? Helping Gabe deal with his past.” His pale blue eyes drifted in my direction. “All of it was because I love you, man. I just wanted you to be…complete.”
I didn’t have a fucking clue what he was talking about. “What the fuck?”
“You tried so hard, Gabe. You wanted to be happy, but I always sensed there was something holding you back. I figured it was probably someone, instead of something. I, uh, started digging around into your past. I researched everything I could about Trenton Falls, trying to figure out what the hell messed with your childhood. Nothing. I couldn’t find a damned thing, other than that tiny town is locked in the twilight zone of homophobia and a serious case of refusing to join the rest of us in this century. They don’t even have a fucking McDonalds, Gabe. That’s just messed up.”
He’d dug into my past? Fury raged in my blood. My friend actually hacked my history? Hell, if he’d done that, he had to have known about the rape charge. Why didn’t he say something? More importantly, why the fuck did he let me spend my entire savings to buy a failing company? Wait, even more important than that, why had he been so damned chipper the entire time if he knew what I’d been walking into? Even when he picked me up at the hotel earlier, he was still grinning like the cat that had suddenly grown wings and had unlimited access to all the little birdies.
“So, you found there was no McDonalds but, in its place, a big fat rape charge against me?” I growled. “And knowing this shit, you didn’t one time try to stop me from making the biggest dumbass move of my life?” I frowned. “Wait, no, you helped me make the biggest dumbass move of my life! When you were cashing in my stocks, retirement funds, and counting the pennies from jars buried in my backyard, you never once considered saying, ‘Hey man, this might be a bad idea. Sleep on it. Let’s talk. Here, let me lock you in the basement until you come to your senses.’” My voice rose to a near-roar. From the corner of my eye, I kept an idea on Ethan and Jeremiah. With only a look, Ethan would let me know when I was about to go too far with Titus. At the moment, his look told me he was firmly in my corner on this one. Hell, he’d been trying to put the brakes on this clusterfuck since the very beginning.
Titus blushed. I would like to call that a victory, tell myself I was getting to him, but he blushed at the drop of a dime, so who knew what was traveling through his brain. Ethan and Titus were not only trust fund babies, but they’d each amassed a fortune all on their own, so there was a damned good chance he wouldn’t be able to understand my frustration over tossing a million cookies to the cookie monster.
“There wasn’t a rape charge on record, Gabe. If I’d read some shit like that, I would have talked to you about it and I definitely wouldn’t have ever allowed any of us into this town if they allowed bullshit like that to happen.” He was shaking his head in confusion. “Definitely no rape charge, man. I’m…I’m sorry. I know it’s all bullshit, but I’m sorry you had to deal with it. Fuck, you were just a kid.”
No rape charge? What the fuck?My mind whirled for a minute before saying, “I was a juvenile, so it would have been in a locked record, right?”
He cocked one eye upward and looked at me like I was the town idiot. Exasperated, he challenged, “There isn’t a locked record in existence that I can’t unlock, Gabe. It wasn’t there. Yes, I’m aware that you streaked across the football field buck-ass naked your freshman year, but then so did one hundred twenty-seven other kids, so I assumed that was a freshman thing.”
“You rebel, you,” Jeremiah said from the couch. Then, in a more serious tone, he added, “Why wouldn’t there be a record, Gabe? Did the kid just threaten to say you raped him?”
I rolled my eyes. “The Chief of Police, a deputy, and Kelsey’s dad showed up at my trailer to haul me in. I heard them telling my parents.”
Jeremiah’s eyebrows shot up. “What? What did you do?”
“I climbed out the window of my room and never looked back. I was scared and I ran.” My mind traveled back to that awful night for a moment and it almost took my breath away. For a second, I was back there, feeling that fear and pain all over again.
“You still with us, Gabe?” Ethan’s voice interrupted my time travel.
I blinked slowly, not caring that I felt a wetness drop against my cheek with the movement. I wasn’t sure if they’d ever seen me cry before, but I wasn’t worried about them seeing it now. The past few hours had proven what they were to me. I took a deep breath and tried to mentally force my pounding heart back into a regular rhythm. “They came me there to arrest me.” I looked up at them. “But I didn’t rape him. What we did…it was consensual. I swear it.”
“Never doubted it, Gabriel. Never once doubted it. Don’t piss us off by thinking for one minute that we would have thought you capable of that,” Ethan said.
“I don’t know him, but he’s a stupid asshole,” Jeremiah muttered. “I’m glad you destroyed his family empire. I just wish there was a way we could hurt him personally.” His eyes darkened with fury. “You know…physically.”
Once again, I felt my ire rise when they said something negative about Kelsey. This reaction? Stupid. Didn’t make sense. Needed to go away. Vanish, like I had on that night so long ago.
I saw Ethan’s face twist into a frown with Jeremiah’s words. Yeah, he’d been in Kelsey’s presence for a tiny window of time and he was already being sucked into his web of feigned innocence. “He…he didn’t seem like the type to do something like that though. I…I don’t know, something’s not right.”
“Are you defending him?” Jeremiah practically roared, knocking Ethan away from him with enough force to almost send the bigger man tumbling onto the floor.
“No! I’m not defending him,” Ethan argued. “I’m merely saying that something isn’t adding up.”
“Seems like pretty simple addition to me. One lie equals one huge asshole,” Jeremiah bit out.
Titus was once again uncharacteristically quiet. He was sitting in his oversized chair, tapping his lip, when he caught me looking at him. He tried for an innocent look. Failed. “What?” he asked.
“Let’s go back to what you said a few minutes ago, Titus. You hadn’t planned on this? You’d only been trying to help? All because you loved me?” I asked, already pretty sure I knew what had happened. Titus neveraccidentallydid anything. Every move he made was calculated, recalculated, and then he would start all over again with the excessive research to ensure he came up with the same conclusion. Soooo…what had he been up to when he allowed me to purchase Morganston Textiles? Hell, he’d practically handled the entire deal himself, so I’d been confident that I would not only be able to screw Kelsey and his family out of their cash cow, but that I’d be able to turn it for a profit or at least a breakeven.
“Uh…yeah, I was hoping you’d forgotten I said that.”
“I didn’t.”
“Neither did I,” Ethan said as he eyed his younger brother from his perch on the sofa. “What’s this about, Titus? Why in the fuck would you interfere with Gabe’s personal shit?”
